The Weirdness of Ferns Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI, executive director of strategy at ad agency McKinney in Los Angeles. She writes her own newsletter on marketing and culture, which you can read here.

Anita here. About a year ago I bought a few Boston ferns to put in window boxes on my patio. They’re your classic fern, a wild mane of fronds that reach up and arch out, filling the visual field with pleasant bright green.

Well, mine got a little too wild, taking over and drowning out its cousin ferns. Boston fern leaves sprouted out of all corners of my window boxes, and green tendrils reached outside of the boxes like curious fingers. In the Los Angeles version of autumn, they also liberally sprinkled spores everywhere, creating a hazy black dust all over my patio furniture. So I decided to uproot them, separate them like naughty children, and move them indoors into pots.

Why is this interesting?

What I discovered as I dug them out was a whole other world: a system with matted layers about 4 inches thick of thready roots that stretched all the way across the bottom of my window box, with hundreds of nodules that looked like tiny kiwis, or alien eggs, or hairy grapes.

What were these odd things? I consulted Google, and found that the internet is full of fern-growers mystified by them. It turns out that a few fern species, including Boston ferns, have a node called a bulbil that stores hydration and nutrients and protects the vigorous fern against drought, or human negligence. (I cut one open, and found a light green interior with the texture of a dense fruit, smelling deeply vegetal.)

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These bulbils look prehistoric, and they may well be. Ferns existed before dinosaurs, and have been credited with creating an environment with enough oxygen for animal life. Since then, they’ve come up with new methods time and again to ensure their survival, from their 10k+ species to their promiscuous spore droppings to their ability to grow from leaf clippings, roots, or rhizomes.

The mysteries of ferns fascinate not just houseplant buffs, but also climate scientists. One group at UC Santa Cruz is exploring how ferns survived, and then thrived, after an asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago. (They’ve been placing ferns in a protected environment that models that extinction-level event.) Other scientists have been studying how a tiny fern called the Azolla played a role in cooling the planet 50 million years ago, to assess how it could potentially do so again with rising temperatures today. 

My own ferns have also survived and thrived even with their transfer to indoor pots, where they have a little less sun and far fewer plant-friends. Scientists approve of this move too; Boston ferns have also been found to be one of the top plants at cleaning the air of pollutants like formaldehyde. (AS)

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Thanks for reading, 

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (AS)

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Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) with editing help from Louis Cheslaw about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.